If you were, you know, living your lives, you've probably missed it, but old fires are burning brightly once again: there's somewhat of a falling-out going on between KDE and GNOME, with Canonical siding squarely with... KDE. The issue seems to revolve around GNOME's lack of collaboration, as explained by KDE's Aaron Seigo.

That's the way it is. Shuttleworth needs to quit whining when others decide not to follow him. If Shuttleworth doesn't like the way GNOME is handling things, he's free to switch Ubuntu to KDE if he wishes.

Actually, Shuttleworth created Unity for precisely this reason. His only disagreement is with GNOMEshell. WRT whining, he's getting regularly attacked by people in the GNOME camp for not using GNOMEshell, so restating the reasons for not using GNOMEshell is appropriate.

Personally, I haven't tried either Unity or GNOMEshell, but from what I've seen I don't look forward to either. I am glad there are alternatives. Let the best shell win. I am willing to give both a try, but if neither work for me, KDE4 doesn't either so I'll go for XFCE since it has always "just worked".

XFCE is indeed a very good alternative to GNOME. GNOME apps work nicely in XFCE, and XFCE offers a stable and familiar desktop environment.

Pretty much the only thing I don't like about XFCE is its window manager, which is almost as lame as metacity. Openbox is a much better alternative, and you can easily change the WM in XFCE to openbox by typing in a terminal window this command:

killall xfwm4 ; openbox & exit

Then exit XFCE, saving the session. The next time you start XFCE, it will use openbox as its WM.

Having used OpenBox, Xfwm4 and Metacity, I can't imagine why you'd think Xfwm4 has more in common with the latter, rather than the former. Xfwm4 is a lot more flexible and capable than Metacity, if nothing else.